The Defiant

“Go away,” I grumbled at the buzzing door, but it kept up its racket, and I eventually left the warm embrace of my comfortable bed to get up and open it.

Five stood on the other side, and I groaned. “What do you want?”

“Well, you’re clearly mad at me, so I thought I’d come down and explain myself,” he said lightly.

“Why should you need to explain yourself, Five? It’s not like you spent a week kissing me, accused me of being ashamed of you, and then kissed my sister the next day. Oh wait, it is like that.” I glared at him, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Okay, first of all, we were casual. Secondly, a week doesn’t exactly constitute a relationship. Thirdly, you’re clearly into someone else, and fourth—”

“Wait a second. Go back to that third one.”

“You’re into someone else? Isn’t that obvious?”

“Not to me. Where on earth did you get that idea?”

Five laughed disbelievingly. “Oh, this is rich. You have no clue. Well, I’m not about to tell you. You should find it out for yourself. Now, back to my reasons. I’m not saying what I did was cool, but let’s be honest, we weren’t going to work out anyway.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“I totally understand if you’re mad at me. I really shouldn’t have kissed Eight, especially not like that, in front of everyone, but I did it half on a lark, really. I didn’t do it to hurt you.”

“Honestly, Five, if you want to hear the truth, I’m not really hurt. You and I aren’t exactly meant to be. I’m not too cut up about losing it. So I’m not hurt, but I sure am mad. You could have handled that situation in about a hundred ways, almost all of which would have been better than the solution you chose. And seriously, Eight? Isn’t that a little weird, jumping immediately to someone who looks exactly like me?”

“It’s not weird with Eight, because even though she looks like you, you guys are so different, I don’t even notice it,” Five said earnestly.

“If you want to date her, I’m fine with that, as we’re not sisters in the usual sense, but don’t go expecting me to forgive you right away. What you did was colossally dumb, and you’ll never be able to convince me otherwise.”

“Believe me, I know that was stupid, so I’m really sorry. Anyway, I hope you’ll be able to get over this eventually, and we can go back to being friends.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“I guess I deserve that.”

“I guess you do,” I mocked. “And who do you think I’m into?” I hadn’t forgotten what he’d said earlier.

Five’s face slipped into its habitual infuriating smirk.

“Good night, One.” He walked back down the hall with a swagger in his step. I closed the door and retreated into my quarters, growling in frustration. Who did Five think he was, acting like a complete inconsiderate dunce, then turning it around to be my fault?

And who did he think I had a thing for?

After the excitement of the last few days, the next week passed in relative normalcy.

You know, as normal as a ship full of strangers from all around the globe traveling through space to complete a highly illegal mission can be. Which isn’t all that normal.

It was December 31, Earth time, our twenty-sixth day in space. Our study sessions had been extremely uncomfortable, what with the awkwardness between Five and I. I was sure the others had noticed something between the two of us, but no one mentioned anything. I was sure they were too focused on Five and Eight.

Seemingly to rub in my face the main reason why we’d broken up, Five and Eight were overly affectionate with each other, making out in only semi-private places every few minutes, and exchanging sappy glances with each other all the time. It seemed like Five had got what he wanted.

As horrible as the studying was, we were all making tremendous progress, especially Four. When prompted, she could speak complete sentences without her accent, and now could even lose her temper without slipping back into it. Unfortunately, she needed extreme concentration to figure out how to say common words, which led to a tendency for her to make faces, a habit we were trying to break her of.

“Four, no face.”

“I can’t help it!” she said, slipping back into her accent as her face relaxed.

“Come on, try again.”

“King Leopold’s first action after his coronation was to lower the working age to fourteen, believing that this would lead to higher income rates for families— What now?” she asked exasperatedly, looking up from the paper she’d been reading. I was shaking my head.

“You’re making the face again.”

“Eurgh!” she cried in frustration.

But other than that, we were getting close to the level of knowledge we would need to pull this off. And despite the enmity between Five and I, we were all working more or less as a team, a necessary element to our success on Cebos.

Three stood up. “Okay, everybody. We will arrive at Cebos in about a week, where we will have to dance at a ball. And none of you can dance, especially not in the way of the Eranians. So I need to teach you.

“There are dance instruction videos in the information left to us by the Aerzhu, also music files. The Cebosians do three main dances—the fire step, the round step, and the village step. The most common one they’ll do at the ball is the round step. The fire step is usually for special occasions, so they may do it as well. The village step is a more provincial choice, so I doubt they’d perform it at an exclusive party, but I think we should learn it just in case. Computer, put on fire step music,” she commanded, and the computer beeped, beginning a sound track.

The song started with a low drum beat, which started slow but steadily increased speed. The sound of a tambourine-like instrument joined it, followed by a high trilling that sounded a bit like a flute. I could see why it was called fire step. It was loud and heart-thumping, exhilarating.

“Fire step is an individual dance. Cross your arms behind your back,” Three instructed over the music. We did so.

“Slide your right heel forward and kick it up, and while you kick slide your left heel forward and do the same,” Three said, demonstrating. “When the drum beat slows, clap your hands over your head. After each tambourine tap, cross your feet and twist around. Then jump back to where you were. All fire steps have the same moves, just different timing.”

I kicked my heels until the tambourine, then crossed my left foot in front of my right and twisted around, followed immediately to a jump with a half-turn in midair. I clapped when the drum beat slowed and then sped up again.

After just a few repetitions, I felt confident enough to take my eyes off my feet while I danced. I looked up to chaos.

“Seven—left over right, not right over left! Two, clap when the drum stops, not all the ti—Four, twist then jump, not together!” Three bellowed.

“Why do I have to learn this?” Five complained. “I’m not even going to be dancing!” He had decent rhythm, but clearly no dance experience. If he just bent his knees more—

“One, you seem to know what you’re doing, get over here and help Seven!” Three called at me.

Seven was, in my opinion, beyond help. She seemed to have no idea where her feet were in relation to her body, and I was kicked in the shins several times before I learned to stand clear. She also had no concept of music, and did not know how to anticipate the drum stops, which led to her clapping a few seconds after she should have.

Three whipped the others into relatively good shape in about an hour or two, but I was still struggling with Seven. Three shut the music off and contemplated Seven.

“Hm. I think Countess Valentina should be recovering from an illness on the day of the ball, and will therefore not be dancing.”

“You think I suck.”

“I’m sure she would never say it like that—” I interjected.

“Yeah, I would. Seven, you have three left feet.”

“I figured. Did you see what I did to poor Two’s toes at the Christmas party?”

“Black and blue,” Two said, making a face.

“I’m still going to have you practice with the rest of us to learn the round step and the village step. Each of those needs an equal number of males and females, so I’ll just have you be a boy. Don’t worry, they don’t really do much.”

“Hey!” Two protested.

“I meant in dancing,” Three explained. Mollified, Two turned away and Three shook her head at me. I snorted.

The round step was a couple dance, with a lot of spins. The steps were relatively simple, mostly just forward and back, at a much more sedate pace than the fire step. Three taught us in just a few minutes.

The village step was more complicated, in that it was a group dance. Three showed us the instruction video. The men and women lined up in two concentric circles, facing each other. When the music began, the men swept their partners under their arms and swirled them back out again, lifted them and turned them, then set them down, where they circled to their next partner. There was a lot of clapping and intricate footwork involved, and it was hard to execute with just the eight of us. Two wasn’t strong enough to lift anyone but Four, and Six was so strong he overcompensated when lifting Four, almost tossing her into the ceiling.

Overall, I was glad that there was almost no chance of us having to perform this at the ball.

Later that night, I had my first dream since the trip began that was not a nightmare.

It started in the galley, with the music playing. We were dancing village step, and when Five lifted Eight, he dropped her and she fell to the ground. I extended a hand to help her up, and she scoffed at me.

“Listen, princess. This is none of your business. We might have the same face, but we are not sisters, and we are not friends,” she said, then transformed into a bat and flew out into space.

At which point, I realized there was no glass in the galley windows, and the rest of us were suddenly sucked toward the window. The others flew through instantly and dissolved into nothingness, but I clung onto the edge of the window until I couldn’t hold on anymore, then I let go.

The dream changed.

I was warm, laying on green grass, looking up into a blue sky with a single blazing sun. The scene had the fuzzy edges you see in dreams, like the world only exists in your frame of view.

That’s when I saw the girl, a girl of about fifteen, running up the hill toward me from a house in the distance. The sunlight glinted off her chocolate-colored hair.

“Ieaheia!” she called to me as she reached me.

I reached for her, to ask her what the word meant, but she vanished like sand in the wind.

I sat straight up in bed, suddenly wide awake, and threw off the covers.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been dreaming about, but I remembered the last image I’d seen before I woke up. The girl’s face.

Seven’s face.